Neck pain is a frequent health complaint. Prolonged protracted malpositions of the head are associated with neck pain and headaches and could be prevented using biofeedback systems. A practical biofeedback system to detect malpositions should be realized with a simple measurement setup. To achieve this, a simple biomechanical model representing head orientation and translation relative to the thorax is introduced. To identify the parameters of this model, anthropometric data were acquired from eight healthy volunteers. In this work we determine (i) the accuracy of the proposed model when the neck length is known, (ii) the dependency of the neck length on the body height, and (iii) the impact of a wrong neck length on the models accuracy. The resulting model is able to describe the motion of the head with a maximum uncertainty of 5 mm only. To achieve this high accuracy the effective neck length must be known a priory. If however, this parameter is assumed to be a linear function of the palpable neck length, the measurement error increases. Still, the resulting accuracy can be sufficient to identify and monitor a protracted malposition of the head relative to the thorax.
Keywords: biomechanical model; movement analysis; neck; neck pain; posture monitoring; protraction; stereophotogrammetry.